Conquering Fear: Embracing God's Promises for Courage

1) "One of the things that we talk about emotions that we I mean that's what we've been talking about all through the month of June is emotions like sadness and emotions like anger they're not things for us to avoid like actually God created us to have and experience sadness and we do experience anger we just don't want to live there right we don't want to live in sadness we don't want anger to be so in control of our lives that it affects how we act and so we're trying to learn how to manage those emotions that God has given us in God honoring ways and so this morning we're talking about the emotion of fear and fear like sadness and anger it's not a bad thing like fear is actually meant to be helpful as long as you're not living in it as long as you don't camp out in fear God has given us the given us the emotion of fear sometimes to keep us safe." [00:45] (46 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


2) "But those things like snakes and spiders and clowns, that's not what keeps us up at night. That's not what changes the way we live our life. It's fears that are a little bit more intangible or harder to identify. It's like the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of loneliness. Yes. or the fear of change, or maybe the fear of death. It's those type things that get in and they change the way that we live. They change the way that we respond." [10:31] (32 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


3) "But there are people who last week worked 60 hours a week or more. And that work schedule and all of those hours, it's affecting their family life. It's affecting their marriage. It's affecting how they parent because they're working so many hours. It's affecting their health. They don't take a day off like God commands us to. And they have all of these health issues, relationship issues, things like that. And it all roots back to something that they don't even realize. Maybe it's a fear of failure. Like if I, I don't put in these hours, I won't be a success. They don't realize it's the fear of failure that's drawing that to them, but it does." [11:12] (35 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


4) "When we really internalize the fact that God says, I won't fail you and I'm not abandoning you, that actually should change. the trajectory of our paths of life, of where we're going, when we really internalize that, when we realize that the God of the universe who created everything with his breath, who sustains it today, says, I've got your back. We're winning together. I'm not letting you down. I'm with you and I'm going to be with you. If we really internalize that, it changes everything." [21:36] (25 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


5) "The Lord's my helper. I'll have no fear because there's nothing that man can do to me because God has promised that he's got my back and God has promised that he's got his presence with me. So what do we do though? Right? Like it's, it's great to go. Yes, but, but you got to leave here, right? You got to leave here and you got to go into work on Monday where fear of rejection or fear of loneliness or fear, fear of loss or things like that that are out there. And we can't just stay here and go, yes, we've got to go out and live this passage of scripture out." [29:12] (37 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


6) "Most of us, because those fears are intangible, they're hidden under the surface, they might have been created because of family trauma when we were kids. Who knows for what reason? We're living our lives and doing things, behaving certain ways and making decisions and they're fear -based and we don't even realize that they're fear -based. And we've got to understand what those are, where those fears come from." [30:17] (25 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


7) "Say yes to something that God's already called you to do. We'll take ministry something. If you're kind of plugged under, we have a lot of guests, but if you go, hey, City Church is my home. Listen, you need to be serving in some way, shape, or form. And serving is going to be one of the best ways for you to take a step to deal with fear. Here's what I mean by that. Most of the times that people say no to serving is because they're afraid of something, right? Then I go, I don't have time. No, you have time. You're just afraid that if you shift the time from what you're doing now to doing ministry or something like that, that you're going to lose something. It's a fear of loss. It's a fear of time. It's not that you don't have time. You're afraid of losing something." [35:20] (36 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


8) "The world is a scary place at times. But you don't have to live in fear. But the only way really that I've come across and in almost 50 years of life, the only solution to fear ultimately is Jesus. Who created the universe, sustains the universe, has defeated death, has defeated sin. He's the only person out there that takes every fear away." [39:58] (34 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)